It’s just the latest disturbing link between social media and people who commit bad acts. How often recently have we read about people engaging in live social media broadcasts of beatings, or rapes, or suicides? For many of us, Facebook and other social media outlets are all about keeping track of other people’s birthdays, kids, puppies, and meals, but for some sick segment of society, social media apparently is seen as a simple, immediately available opportunity to achieve notoriety and display their violent criminal activity to the world.

It raises the chicken or egg question: what comes first, the impulse to engage in the bad acts, or the desire to be broadcast doing it? If it weren’t possible to easily upload a video or stream a live broadcast on social media, would the crimes still have been committed, or is the ability to display video evidence of the bad acts to a presumed audience and obtain a few minutes of depraved fame the ultimate triggering factor?

There have always been predators in our midst; violent criminal acts have been part of human history since the dawn of time. Still, for some people there seems to be some basic and grotesque connection between social media and wrongdoing, and we are left to wonder: would the poor man murdered by the Cleveland killer still be alive if the social media outlets weren’t available to be misused?